Thursday, October 03, 2013

Worst Base Running Team in Baseball

If you follow the Tigers closely, you have surely figured out that base running is not one of their strengths. From Alex Avila to Miguel Cabrera to Victor Martinez and beyond, the Tigers are just not built for speed. Even if you don't watch very often, you may have noticed that no Tiger reached double figures in stolen bases this year. The last time they failed to have one player reach ten stolen bases was in 1973 when a team of aging stars such as Norm Cash, Bill Freehan and Al Kaline combined for just 28 stolen bases.

This year's team stole just 35 bases with 20 caught stealing for a mediocre 64% success rate. Base running is more than just stealing bases though. For example, a
player can move from first to third on a single (or fail to do so) or
advance a base on a fly ball. Baseball Prospectus uses a complex
algorithm to track all kinds of base running advancement. The BP base running statistics created by Dan Fox (now a statistician for the Pirates) include the following (all expressed in terms of runs above average):

HAR (Equivalent Hit Advancement Runs)
- contribution of runners taking the extra base on a hit: first to
third on a single, second to home on a single, first to home on a
double.

OAR (Equivalent Other Advancement Runs)
- contribution of other base running advancements - passed balls, wild
pitches and balks (evidence shows that those events are not entirely
randomly and are influenced by base runners to an extent).

BRR (Equivalent Base Running Runs)- the sum of the five above statistics above or total base running contribution.

Note
that players are penalized for making outs and also for not advancing
when the average base runner would have been expected to do so.

So, the Tigers were below average in all types of base running plays and were especially deficient at advancing on ground outs (last in baseball), fly balls (last) and hits (second to last).
The BRR number tells us that base running cost the Tigers an
estimated 22 runs compared to the average team with the
same opportunities. This was by far the worst total in the majors.

Individually, lead-off man Austin Jackson was the Tigers best base runner with 4.7 BRR (See Table 1). Not surprisingly though, most of their regulars were under zero meaning they cost the team runs with their base running. The worst runners were Martinez (-5.9) and Fielder (-5.3).

Table 2 below shows that the Tigers were not the only playoff team that was below average in base running, but they cost themselves 17 more runs than the Braves who were second worst base running team to reach post-season. The best base running team among post-season clubs was the Cardinals with 14.3 BRR led by major league leader Matt Carpenter (8.6).

Fortunately, the Tigers were able to score plenty of runs without the benefit of speed as they finished second in the American League with a .780 OPS and 4.9 runs scored per game. On the downside, it's not as easy to hit in the post-season when you're facing strong pitchers most nights. Thus, the ability to manufacture runs probably becomes a little more important. The Tigers won't be stealing many runs though, so they will have to continue to hit for average and power in order to score runs in post-season,.